As alluded to by Ed, Austin is spared from the worst instincts of its leftist municipal government by the state legislature (like Florida). No sanctuary cities, plastic bag bans, etc are allowed. Several years ago, the city banned ride shares (progressives against progress as I like to say), but the state stepped in and made them change. So, Austin residents can thank the state government for their ubereats robots.
Banning Airbnb and ridesharing in many "blue" cities has to do with protecting corporate taxi companies and hotels from competition mainly. All the lefty talk about hating corporations and "oligarchs" is just for show. Also, wherever a union is involved, the democrat party will do whatever the union wants, so in the case of Airbnb, the hotel workers complained.
Just to be clear, the politicians don't say, "hey we are protecting our corporate/union patrons, so no ride share for you". They say that it's unregulated, therefore unsafe so we are protecting you. Or, the drivers are being exploited, despite those drivers lining up to sign up for the gig work.
Re: When I arrived in Austin, Texas it was close to 35 degrees, in mid-October;
Not quite so bad here in Florida. We're surrounded by water so that keeps the temperatures from hitting inland highs-- but also gives us killer humidity. In August it feels like one can swim through the air.
Re: Texas’s capital is among the fastest growing urban areas in the United States
It helps that it's in the middle of no where and so can expand in all directions with no one screaming "NIMBY!" except prairie dogs and tumbleweeds.
I don't know that IQ, a rather unreliable number (it varies over time), matters so much as certain credentials that prive pedigree, a certain cleverness and a lack of serious morals that enable one to be selfish and self-serving.
Re: New wealth may inevitably drive out the bohemians who gave the city its soul.
Something like that (on a smaller scale) happened in Ann Arbor MI, just in time for me to start college at the University of Michigan. In the 60s and the 70s the city was known as a hippie hang-out, home of the hash-bash and the stentorious campus protest, hosting a college circuit underground music scene where REM and Nirvana played before they became famous. But by the 80s its healthcare and tech businesses were bringing in a more sober populace and even the students, many of them children of privilege, were quieting down a lot. The place got serious about enforcing the 21 year old drinking age, the head shops shifted from paraphernalia to selling nostalgic 60s kitsch and the last straw was the basketball championship riot of 1989 when too many students got too jubilant over the UofM's victory and trashed downtown. Ann Arbor, as I said, became Anal Arbor all buttoned-up and scowling.
Re: elites don’t preach the conservatism they practise,
Oh, but they do. Apart from some bohemians who strike it rich in music or athletics, most of our rich are fairly dull, nose to the grindstone types. Yes, they have their eccentricities which they indulge, but they aren't "sex and drugs and rock-n-roll" hippies. Far from it. And when it comes to money they make the 19th century robber barons look like unmercenary saints.
Re: the mentally ill and addicted to gravitate to those offering the most hospitality – warm and blue.
There have been studies on this. The homeless gravitate from suburbs and rural ares to nearby big cities, but they don't tend to migrate cross country. There are to be sure those people who picked up stakes and moved to some distant place because they heard it had a booming economy and they hoped to cash in-- only to find they had no real marketable skills and so fell through the cracks and became homeless.
Have to say the causality of the air con -> industrious South looks a bit post hoc, ergo propter hoc to me. So much was happening in the USA around the turn of the last century to WWI, that I'm sure there are other factors.
it's very hard for very hot regions to compete without air-con. Singapore and UAE wouldn't have become so rich without them. I think it very unlikely the South would have been caught up to such an extent without it.
There is no way in hell (pun intended) Florida would be the fourth most populous state without AC. Even with it there's a fair number of people who spend only the cooler half of the year down here and scamper back up north after Easter.
"Lance Armstrong, who still has a bikeway named in his honour, I was surprised to learn" They still have a monument to Confederate soldiers in the grounds of the Capital Building! I took a photo of it when I visited (on a Friday Night Lights pilgrimage) ten years ago, and assumed it had been taken down in 2020, but apparently it's still standing, with its inscription that they "died for State rights".
I actually think that 'state's rights' is a sort of RW version of the midwit 'err it's complicated and nuanced' argument. It *was* about slavery! they seceded pretty much in order of the proportion of slaves they owned.
I'm not convinced about that. States' rights are real in the Constitution, as I understand it (being neither a lawyer nor American). It is supposed to be the United States and not Federal America. It's a limited government thing. And there are plenty of people who'll tell you the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, at all.
there was most certainly a legal argument for state's rights, and even some northern constitutionalists agreed they had good legal arguments, but the overwhelming cause was the divide between free states and slave states. It was driving the increasing tension about new admissions, after all, and the violence in Kansas.
All the clashes over state rights issues (e.g., the tariff) were amenable to compromise and compromises were forged over them. Moreover the early 19th century Federal government was not exactly a juggernaut crushing the states. They had vastly more latitude to do as they pleased except where the Constitution forbade it.
When it comes to sheer hypocrisy the former slave states win a blue ribbon over the matter of escaped slaves where they demanded the Federal government force free states to return the escaped slaves to their masters and be damned to local laws on the matter. So much for states rights there. The Dred Scott decision (which basically set at naught free states' anti-slavery laws and dripped with racist malice in the process), convinced many Northerners that the South intended to dictate to the whole the country on the issue and states rights did not matter to the slaveholders.
Not really. At least before the Trumpian restoration the Supreme Court had been pushing back on Federal bullying for a while. Hence the ACA decision in which the Feds were told No, they could not extort the states on the Medicaid expansion. Alas, now the Trump and his gang want to remake the nation in their image, states rights are getting dumped overboard. See: the very recent executive order banning state level regulation of AI.
Like the 9th Amendment the 10th is more than a little vague since it does spell out the details and so we will have arguments over what it means (ditto the 9th too) for the open-ended future.
Yeah, the anti-slavery thing is hugely overstated. They weren’t heaving the oars on a galley, they had homes and jobs and families - but not FREEDOM!! To do what, in 19th century America? To enjoy FREEDOM!! Like William Wallace and the American Revolutionaries and the phenomenally successful Operation Enduring FREEDOM in Afghanistan, and closing mental hospitals and much else besides, it’s all about FREEDOM!!
I highly recommend reading Lincoln’s July 4, 1861 address to Congress. He basically said that a country where the minority threatens to take their ball and go home anytime they don’t get their way (or the fear of someday not getting their way in the case of the South) is not tolerable.
“It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask, Is there in all republics this inherent and fatal weakness?”
Thanks for the “shout out” to St John’s. Two of my children attended that Institution. One in Annapolis, one in Santa Fe. Best College in America. I wish I could have gone there.
Capitalism, for all its abundant benefits, does not lend itself to the creation of beauty. A real shame.
"Texas is mind-numbingly big, and this part of it is on the border of two climates, the desert of the West and the swamp of the Mississippi delta. As we walk past a river which looks like the sort of place you’d pick up a flesh-eating virus if you went for a swim, he points out a venomous snake."
Much of Texas's cities are located in a little known climate called the "humid subtropical". It has no dry season, hot, muggy summers, and cool winters. Out of all the Earth's climates, it is home to the largest number of people and has the biggest population density of any climatic zone:
Here in Florida we do have a dry season: fall and winter, albeit that does not mean no rain ever. But we have been in near-drought conditions this fall though last weekend we got some relief.
"...but this graduate demographic then insists on voting for policies driven by status competition in which empathy is a primary virtue. "
I have always thought that the "anti-woke" obsession with "empathy" as a driving force (https://cracksinpomo.substack.com/p/the-rights-strong-feelings-about) really sugar-coats their opponents. Much of their behaviour seems to be driven less by "empathy" by those perceived to be at the bottom than a vindictive desire to tear down those at the top and middle and make everyone equally oppressed! What Nietzsche called the "revenge" aspect of slave morality.
As Steve Sailer brilliantly put it:
"Personally, “dignity” would strike me as an odd characterization of such recent manifestations of identity politics as your local gay pride parade, Ferguson’s bouts of undocumented shopping, Bruce Jenner in a ball gown, or the Asia Argento vs. Rose McGowan #MeToo spat. Nor do I expect the upcoming Supreme Court nomination hearing/teen sex comedy to be a high point in the history of American dignity.
If I were looking for an alliterative subtitle, I might try instead “The Demand for Dominance.” Contemporary identity politics seem far less about Jackie Robinson maintaining a stiff upper lip as he demonstrates his right to play baseball than about Serena Williams feeling entitled to go off on the tennis umpire."
The days when stoicism was valued in this culture (apart from a few rebels like me) are far behind us. Perhaps it was buried with my father, who saw WWII up close and personal, and afterward buried three wives, a son and a daughter (and a teenage brother too), eventually declining by slow miserable inches with COPD-- yet somehow the man kept a pleasant disposition, a check on his temper and did very little whining ever.
Bit confused about 14th century Genoa making navigational instruments that allows sailors to “travel the world without the use of stars”. GPS has only been around for a few decades, Ed 🙂 Accurate clocks were the thing that first allowed them to judge longitude in the open sea, while the North Star mainly and the sun (also a star) were still useful in judging direction and latitude - the inventor of the marine chronometer, John Harrison, was an 18th century Englishman.
"way more patents"? What is this barbarous language you have picked up? Or should I say, y'all? (Oh noes, "way more lavish" too.)
What is this about "post-war British poetry"? The stuff hardly exists. Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was probably the last decent British poet. Much as I wish it were possible, I doubt a bookshop can survive on the works of Philip Larkin alone. But this leads to Austin's galleries being mediocre. Surely this is downstream of there being so little good post-war art? All the stuff you want to see has been bought by the galleries which were rich decades ago.
Still, another very good and informative article. Yeehaw, as they say.
I saw a Pointless episode the other day where the Q was something like “Name a post-war British poet whose works include The Whitsun Weddings and whose initials are PL”. The % of people who knew the answer: 3 🙁
The Austin-SF contrast perfectly illustrates how conservative state leadership and deregulation deliver prosperity and innovation, while unchecked liberal policies lead to decline.
Texas is winning big!
America needs more of this model!
Meanwhile my blue state of Illinois languishes under incompetence and wrongheaded leftist claptrap and is in dire need of a politically cleansing enema.
Can't imagine chronically resentful British dysfunctionals, or schoolboys, allowing R2D2-lookalike Ubereats to move along the pavement unmolested.
Well, we're just going to have to give those robots ray guns, along with a sink plunger to carry the Ubereats. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
Ah, like the Daleks! Gotta say, the idea of robots zapping the people who make life in Britain almost intolerable appeals to me greatly.
As alluded to by Ed, Austin is spared from the worst instincts of its leftist municipal government by the state legislature (like Florida). No sanctuary cities, plastic bag bans, etc are allowed. Several years ago, the city banned ride shares (progressives against progress as I like to say), but the state stepped in and made them change. So, Austin residents can thank the state government for their ubereats robots.
why would they ban ride shares? or am i being very naive.
Banning Airbnb and ridesharing in many "blue" cities has to do with protecting corporate taxi companies and hotels from competition mainly. All the lefty talk about hating corporations and "oligarchs" is just for show. Also, wherever a union is involved, the democrat party will do whatever the union wants, so in the case of Airbnb, the hotel workers complained.
Just to be clear, the politicians don't say, "hey we are protecting our corporate/union patrons, so no ride share for you". They say that it's unregulated, therefore unsafe so we are protecting you. Or, the drivers are being exploited, despite those drivers lining up to sign up for the gig work.
Re: When I arrived in Austin, Texas it was close to 35 degrees, in mid-October;
Not quite so bad here in Florida. We're surrounded by water so that keeps the temperatures from hitting inland highs-- but also gives us killer humidity. In August it feels like one can swim through the air.
Re: Texas’s capital is among the fastest growing urban areas in the United States
It helps that it's in the middle of no where and so can expand in all directions with no one screaming "NIMBY!" except prairie dogs and tumbleweeds.
I don't know that IQ, a rather unreliable number (it varies over time), matters so much as certain credentials that prive pedigree, a certain cleverness and a lack of serious morals that enable one to be selfish and self-serving.
Re: New wealth may inevitably drive out the bohemians who gave the city its soul.
Something like that (on a smaller scale) happened in Ann Arbor MI, just in time for me to start college at the University of Michigan. In the 60s and the 70s the city was known as a hippie hang-out, home of the hash-bash and the stentorious campus protest, hosting a college circuit underground music scene where REM and Nirvana played before they became famous. But by the 80s its healthcare and tech businesses were bringing in a more sober populace and even the students, many of them children of privilege, were quieting down a lot. The place got serious about enforcing the 21 year old drinking age, the head shops shifted from paraphernalia to selling nostalgic 60s kitsch and the last straw was the basketball championship riot of 1989 when too many students got too jubilant over the UofM's victory and trashed downtown. Ann Arbor, as I said, became Anal Arbor all buttoned-up and scowling.
Re: elites don’t preach the conservatism they practise,
Oh, but they do. Apart from some bohemians who strike it rich in music or athletics, most of our rich are fairly dull, nose to the grindstone types. Yes, they have their eccentricities which they indulge, but they aren't "sex and drugs and rock-n-roll" hippies. Far from it. And when it comes to money they make the 19th century robber barons look like unmercenary saints.
Re: the mentally ill and addicted to gravitate to those offering the most hospitality – warm and blue.
There have been studies on this. The homeless gravitate from suburbs and rural ares to nearby big cities, but they don't tend to migrate cross country. There are to be sure those people who picked up stakes and moved to some distant place because they heard it had a booming economy and they hoped to cash in-- only to find they had no real marketable skills and so fell through the cracks and became homeless.
"On the border between a desert zone and the Mississippi delta swamp."
Somehow, I'm not entranced.
Even by the stray reptiles.
and they have deadly spiders!
"Air conditioning changed all that, and as a result American life has become far more orientated towards the South."
Here's a good article on why warm and hot regions of the Earth have historically been poorer.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/mountains
Have to say the causality of the air con -> industrious South looks a bit post hoc, ergo propter hoc to me. So much was happening in the USA around the turn of the last century to WWI, that I'm sure there are other factors.
it's very hard for very hot regions to compete without air-con. Singapore and UAE wouldn't have become so rich without them. I think it very unlikely the South would have been caught up to such an extent without it.
There is no way in hell (pun intended) Florida would be the fourth most populous state without AC. Even with it there's a fair number of people who spend only the cooler half of the year down here and scamper back up north after Easter.
"Lance Armstrong, who still has a bikeway named in his honour, I was surprised to learn" They still have a monument to Confederate soldiers in the grounds of the Capital Building! I took a photo of it when I visited (on a Friday Night Lights pilgrimage) ten years ago, and assumed it had been taken down in 2020, but apparently it's still standing, with its inscription that they "died for State rights".
I was surprised too.
I actually think that 'state's rights' is a sort of RW version of the midwit 'err it's complicated and nuanced' argument. It *was* about slavery! they seceded pretty much in order of the proportion of slaves they owned.
I'm not convinced about that. States' rights are real in the Constitution, as I understand it (being neither a lawyer nor American). It is supposed to be the United States and not Federal America. It's a limited government thing. And there are plenty of people who'll tell you the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, at all.
there was most certainly a legal argument for state's rights, and even some northern constitutionalists agreed they had good legal arguments, but the overwhelming cause was the divide between free states and slave states. It was driving the increasing tension about new admissions, after all, and the violence in Kansas.
All the clashes over state rights issues (e.g., the tariff) were amenable to compromise and compromises were forged over them. Moreover the early 19th century Federal government was not exactly a juggernaut crushing the states. They had vastly more latitude to do as they pleased except where the Constitution forbade it.
When it comes to sheer hypocrisy the former slave states win a blue ribbon over the matter of escaped slaves where they demanded the Federal government force free states to return the escaped slaves to their masters and be damned to local laws on the matter. So much for states rights there. The Dred Scott decision (which basically set at naught free states' anti-slavery laws and dripped with racist malice in the process), convinced many Northerners that the South intended to dictate to the whole the country on the issue and states rights did not matter to the slaveholders.
10th amendment. Completely ignored and trampled on.
Not really. At least before the Trumpian restoration the Supreme Court had been pushing back on Federal bullying for a while. Hence the ACA decision in which the Feds were told No, they could not extort the states on the Medicaid expansion. Alas, now the Trump and his gang want to remake the nation in their image, states rights are getting dumped overboard. See: the very recent executive order banning state level regulation of AI.
Like the 9th Amendment the 10th is more than a little vague since it does spell out the details and so we will have arguments over what it means (ditto the 9th too) for the open-ended future.
Yeah, the anti-slavery thing is hugely overstated. They weren’t heaving the oars on a galley, they had homes and jobs and families - but not FREEDOM!! To do what, in 19th century America? To enjoy FREEDOM!! Like William Wallace and the American Revolutionaries and the phenomenally successful Operation Enduring FREEDOM in Afghanistan, and closing mental hospitals and much else besides, it’s all about FREEDOM!!
And of course, FREEDOM Fries, that won the war in Iraq.
I highly recommend reading Lincoln’s July 4, 1861 address to Congress. He basically said that a country where the minority threatens to take their ball and go home anytime they don’t get their way (or the fear of someday not getting their way in the case of the South) is not tolerable.
“It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask, Is there in all republics this inherent and fatal weakness?”
Thanks for the “shout out” to St John’s. Two of my children attended that Institution. One in Annapolis, one in Santa Fe. Best College in America. I wish I could have gone there.
Capitalism, for all its abundant benefits, does not lend itself to the creation of beauty. A real shame.
"Texas is mind-numbingly big, and this part of it is on the border of two climates, the desert of the West and the swamp of the Mississippi delta. As we walk past a river which looks like the sort of place you’d pick up a flesh-eating virus if you went for a swim, he points out a venomous snake."
Much of Texas's cities are located in a little known climate called the "humid subtropical". It has no dry season, hot, muggy summers, and cool winters. Out of all the Earth's climates, it is home to the largest number of people and has the biggest population density of any climatic zone:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FHj71X_k8h0&pp=ygUZaHVtaWQgc3VidHJvcGljYWwgY2xpbWF0ZQ%3D%3D
Here in Florida we do have a dry season: fall and winter, albeit that does not mean no rain ever. But we have been in near-drought conditions this fall though last weekend we got some relief.
"...but this graduate demographic then insists on voting for policies driven by status competition in which empathy is a primary virtue. "
I have always thought that the "anti-woke" obsession with "empathy" as a driving force (https://cracksinpomo.substack.com/p/the-rights-strong-feelings-about) really sugar-coats their opponents. Much of their behaviour seems to be driven less by "empathy" by those perceived to be at the bottom than a vindictive desire to tear down those at the top and middle and make everyone equally oppressed! What Nietzsche called the "revenge" aspect of slave morality.
As Steve Sailer brilliantly put it:
"Personally, “dignity” would strike me as an odd characterization of such recent manifestations of identity politics as your local gay pride parade, Ferguson’s bouts of undocumented shopping, Bruce Jenner in a ball gown, or the Asia Argento vs. Rose McGowan #MeToo spat. Nor do I expect the upcoming Supreme Court nomination hearing/teen sex comedy to be a high point in the history of American dignity.
If I were looking for an alliterative subtitle, I might try instead “The Demand for Dominance.” Contemporary identity politics seem far less about Jackie Robinson maintaining a stiff upper lip as he demonstrates his right to play baseball than about Serena Williams feeling entitled to go off on the tennis umpire."
https://www.takimag.com/article/diversity-vs-dignity/
The days when stoicism was valued in this culture (apart from a few rebels like me) are far behind us. Perhaps it was buried with my father, who saw WWII up close and personal, and afterward buried three wives, a son and a daughter (and a teenage brother too), eventually declining by slow miserable inches with COPD-- yet somehow the man kept a pleasant disposition, a check on his temper and did very little whining ever.
Bit confused about 14th century Genoa making navigational instruments that allows sailors to “travel the world without the use of stars”. GPS has only been around for a few decades, Ed 🙂 Accurate clocks were the thing that first allowed them to judge longitude in the open sea, while the North Star mainly and the sun (also a star) were still useful in judging direction and latitude - the inventor of the marine chronometer, John Harrison, was an 18th century Englishman.
"way more patents"? What is this barbarous language you have picked up? Or should I say, y'all? (Oh noes, "way more lavish" too.)
What is this about "post-war British poetry"? The stuff hardly exists. Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was probably the last decent British poet. Much as I wish it were possible, I doubt a bookshop can survive on the works of Philip Larkin alone. But this leads to Austin's galleries being mediocre. Surely this is downstream of there being so little good post-war art? All the stuff you want to see has been bought by the galleries which were rich decades ago.
Still, another very good and informative article. Yeehaw, as they say.
What I know about modern poetry could fit on a stamp. I was just following Daniel!
I saw a Pointless episode the other day where the Q was something like “Name a post-war British poet whose works include The Whitsun Weddings and whose initials are PL”. The % of people who knew the answer: 3 🙁
Would you ever move to America, Ed?
Don't think so, but I'm definitely coming back!
Excellent piece, Ed!
The Austin-SF contrast perfectly illustrates how conservative state leadership and deregulation deliver prosperity and innovation, while unchecked liberal policies lead to decline.
Texas is winning big!
America needs more of this model!
Meanwhile my blue state of Illinois languishes under incompetence and wrongheaded leftist claptrap and is in dire need of a politically cleansing enema.